The Resilience Research Centre (RRC) coordinates four research programs running in more than a dozen countries worldwide. These projects enable the RRC to explore resilience as both a process and an outcome. Summaries of the projects are listed below with a link to a PDF exploring each project in greater detail.
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The Pathways to Resilience Project (PTR) seeks to better understand how youth navigate between formal mandated services like child welfare, education, mental health, and youth justice, as well as how youth access informal family and community supports. Our goal is to understand the role services and supports play in helping to build the capacities of young people that are associated with resilience, and how collaboration between services and supports can address the risk factors young people face. |
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The Negotiating Resilience Project (NRP) is a visual methods qualitative study of how youth from many different countries cope with daily challenges. The study uses visual methods, this includes both video and still photographs, to capture a day in the life of each participating young person. Through the use of visual methods and engaging youth themselves in the analysis of the data, our goal is to identify hidden aspects of resilience that have not been identified in empirical literature. Many of the dimensions of resilience are culturally embedded and in some cases, have yet to be studied across different social ecologies. |
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The International Resilience Project (IRP) seeks to broaden our understanding of how resilience is conceptualized across cultures and contexts. The IRP is currently validating a culturally sensitive measure of youth resilience, the Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM), and gathering life stories from individuals around the world who survive and thrive in contextually and culturally specific ways. |
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Stories of Transition explores factors informing career decisions among young people during the decade after high school. This qualitative study interviewed more than 100 emerging adults in five different parts of Canada, each with a different economic climate that presented both challenges and barriers to career starters. |
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The National Centres for Excellence (NCE) Children and Youth in Challenging Contexts (CYCC) Knowledge Mobilization Network works collaboratively across a wide range of academic and community partners. By synthesizing evidence based practice and practice based evidence, this project will establish how knowledge is currently being used to promote well-being in different groups of vulnerable youth, assess commonalities, make the knowledge accessible, and share it. The project is focused on the areas of violence prevention, youth engagement, and the innovative use of technology in delivering mental health services. By bridging research and practice, identifying common themes, developing innovative forms of knowledge uptake, and working reciprocally to establish knowledge exchange with the communities themselves, the NCE CYCC is building a sustained network of research and ongoing collaboration. |
The Resilience Research Centre has carried out numerous evaluations of programs concerned with well-being of children, youth, and families. Click on the logos below for a short description of some of them. Please contact Amber Raja for more information.
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The Social Ecological Approach to clinical practice is one application of the results from the RRC’s resilience research. It is a family, school and community-based intervention developed by Dr. Michael Ungar. The development of a validated approach to clinical intervention is meant to use that research to influence practice and policy. The approach, known as S.E.A., is being taught to clinicians working in different services. Ongoing monitoring of client progress and clinician fidelity is helping to demonstrate S.E.A.’s efficacy as a model of practice.
The first evaluation of S.E.A. is focused on addressing the needs of youth ages 11-20 who show serious antisocial behaviour. This research on the model’s efficacy seeks to address the question, does the Social Ecological Approach as a therapeutic model reduce serious antisocial behavior in adolescents. Serious antisocial behavior includes a range of problems that result in referral to mental health services, youth justice services, and addictions services. This research is taking place in three sites across Nova Scotia. We expect to expand the training for clinicians and to conduct future studies of S.E.A. with other clinical populations.
S.E.A. was inspired by work in four areas: 1) observation of clinical and community change processes; 2) review of the ecology of human development literature; 3) clinical experience with the best practices in family therapy; and 4) research on resilience across cultures and contexts. Why S.E.A. works has much to do with what each of these four sources of information teaches us about helping people achieve psychological well-being despite exposure to severe and, or, chronic adversity.
